Frantic Assembly’s two-hander, first performed at the Drum Theatre Plymouth last year, is a powerful piece of theatre, funny, shocking, erotic and chilling. There is real harmony between Bryony Lavery’s poetic script and the techniques of physical theatre that the company favours; a synergy between the visual and the verbal that is all too rare.

The performers – Georgina Lamb as Kali, Samuel James as Todd – use dance and movement to convey the erotic charge between the couple, as they indulge in a sex act on the stairs or stand in their glossy kitchen reminiscing about the first night they met. These sequences aren’t at all jarring, instead they add to the sense of this couple’s too-intense relationship. We see them writhing on the kitchen counter, hands all over the other’s bodies, practically devouring each other in the process.

But it soon becomes clear that this ‘perfect’ existence of theirs has something rotten at its foundations. At Kali’s behest, Todd ignores letters and phone calls from his parents, and the couple are slowly cutting themselves off from their friends too. After all, they have each other, so why on earth would they need anyone else? Even their answer machine message is hostile to outsiders. They are the living embodiment of Stockholm Syndrome; they are hostages to one other. Unable and unwilling to break free despite the danger, despite the fact that the merest mention of one of Todd’s past lovers causes jealously to bubble up in Kali like bile, despite the fact that she regularly checks his mobile phone for texts and missed calls from unfamiliar numbers. Their passion teeters on a thread, and it doesn’t take much to tip it over into anger, into violence, for their ravenous embraces to be replaced with fists and kicks.

Frantic Assembly’s Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett direct and choreograph the piece, creating a sense of growing emotional unease and physical danger. The production has a remarkable cohesiveness, with both the words and visuals, set design and music all coming together to create an experience that is unsettling but engaging – one of the most satisfying things that I’ve seen in a while.

Within its 70 minutes the production takes you on a journey into this couple’s dark little world, it takes you beneath the gleaming surface of their romantic afternoon trips to the cinema and their expensive, polished home, beneath the sheen of perfection. The little references to horror films that crop up are particularly appropriate as there is real horror here. These are prisons that people create for themselves. Towards the end we even get a glimpse of the couple’s future, a future that’s frightening, but somehow inevitable. Their paths are pre-set, they can’t help themselves. Though their relationship is harming them, neither can leave, neither can pull away.

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from the archive The Winter's Tale Mark Ravenhill INTERVIEW Edinburgh Fringe 2009 SEASON PREVIEW